Why do you think that rather than Mike is genuinely interested in novel compression methodologies, and willing to pay some money to make interested people attempt to discover them?
Because that's pretty much what he says in his post to comp.compression, where he announces that someone accepted the challenge. Let me quote:
> Before naming the individual and giving additional details of our
> correspondence, I would like to give him some time to analyze the
> data I will be sending him. It would be very easy to point out to
> him the impossibility of his task, but far more interesting to see
> how long he will struggle with the problem before realizing it for
> himself.
>
> I am supposing that one of his fellow co-workers probably referred
> him to my challenge, as I cannot fathom that someone would read the
> comp.compression faq first and then want to participate after
> understanding the futility of the effort. On the other hand, some
> people just don't understand information theory too well.
>
> I'll try to give him a complete explanation of his error after a
> week or so, I guess. :)
So Mike is just smug about how clever he is, how stupid the other
person is, not even suspecting there might be a loophole in the
challenge.
I see no sign of interest in learning what the other person is up
to, or even admitting that there might be something to learn.
There was a problem in comp.compression (or whatever Usenet newsgroup) of arrogant challengers announcing their brilliant new compression algorithm. This bet is a way of demonstrating at least the pigeon hole problem to other people.
